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Architecture & Design

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Process & Practices

In-App Subscriptions Made Easy

There are various types of subscriptions: recurring, non-recurring, free-trial periods, various billing cycles and any possible billing variation one can imagine. But with lack of information online, you might discover that mobile subscriptions behave differently from what you expected. This article will make your life somewhat easier when addressing an in-app subscriptions implementation.

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Operations & Infrastructure

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Enterprise Architecture

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

News

Facebook engineers Slobodan Predolac and Nicolas Spielberg have recently described how they "solved a long-term mobile debugging problem and reduced the crash rate ... by more than 50 percent." In the process, they show general useful techniques and a few Facebook tools that can help with large, rapidly evolving codebases.

New Facebook Graph API v2.1 incorporates several commonly requested features that build on the changes in v2.0, says Facebook. The company has also sparked a certain amount of reactions announcing changes to its platform policies that prohibit well-established like-gating practices.

Facebook has open-sourced Haxl, a library for efficient, concurrent data-access. The library leverages the traditional strengths of Haskell such as expressive type system, correctness and safety guarantees, as well as GHC's high performance run-time to solve the thorny issue of implicit, concurrent data access.

Facebook has released Jest, built on top of the Jasmine test framework, for JavaScript Unit Testing. Jest automatically mocks dependencies when running tests, and uses CommonJS instead of a proprietary module loader.

This article has been updated based on community and Jing Chen (Facebook)’s reaction. (See the Update section below.)
Facebook came to the conclusion that MVC does not scale up for their needs and has decided to use a different pattern instead: Flux.

At its F8 developer conference, Facebook announced App Links, an open, cross-platform solution for app-to-app linking aiming at making it easier for developers to link to other applications from their own apps. Besides Facebook, many companies have announced their support for App Links, including Parse, Dropbox, and Spotify. Android, iOS, and Windows Phone are currently supported.

PlanOut is Facebook's language for online field experiments supporting "A/B tests," factorial designs, and more. According to Facebook, PlanOut makes possible to separate experimental design from application code and allows experimenters to concisely describe their designs. Facebook claims to be using PlanOut to run over a thousand experiments each day that involve hundreds of millions of people.

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter have decided to make sure that a relational databases is “web-scale”, so they have put their efforts behind WebScaleSQL, a branch of MySQL 5.6 Community Edition.

AlchemyAPI recently announced a taxonomy and a sentiment analysis API based on deep learning that can help transform digital content into ad inventory. IBM, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and others are working in the deep learning space. We take the high level view of what deep learning is all about and what are the key advances throughout the past months in the field.

PHP has long filled an important role at Facebook, and over the years the company has constantly sought to improve the language's performance. First there was the Hip Hop Virtual Machine, and now there is the Hack, programming language.

Cassandra is rapidly heading towards 2.1 release, with 2.1.0-beta1 already available for evaluation. We take a look at major features introduced in the latest major release and what's coming up. Supported by DataStax, Cassandra is expanding its reach towards the enterprise world. DataStax recently announced a partner network program, Patrick McFadin called out on MongoDB's scaling issues and other

Facebook has open sourced Conceal, a set of Java APIs for file encryption and authentication on Android. Conceal uses a subset of OpenSSL’s algorithms and predefined options in order to keep the library smaller, currently being 85KB.

Om is a new a ClojureScript interface for Facebook’s React HTML UI library. Om uses Clojure(Script)'s persistent data structures and requestAnimationFrame to further improve React's rendering. InfoQ talked to Om's creator, David Nolen, about Om and the benefits of functional concepts for application programming.

Facebook has posted on how they've sped up Mercurial to be five times faster than Git in certain operations. Read on to find out what they have changed, and why it makes such a difference for their setup.